The blog of a chug-a-long angler enjoying his life at the water side…

Sessions 49-51 – Somerset Holiday Week

On Monday 19th October Liz and I, along with Liz’s brother this year, headed off to our usual October Sun newspaper holiday break – and this year we extended our usual Monday-Friday stay by booking an additional weekend – ie we stayed there from Monday 19th and left on the morning of Monday 26th. As with the previous three years too our stay was at the Lakeside Holiday Park in Burnham-on-Sea – a site which not only has an on-site fishing pool of 30 pegs that is (a) residents only and (b) free to fish but also has an excellent ambience and excellent evening entertainment led by a brilliant entertainments manager – he actually constructs the sets and scripts/choreographs the materials for the staff show plus comperes/bingo calls/runs the quizzes and other games on the evenings… and he LOVES his job and it shows too!! 😀

Also over the week the three of us combined won £160 on the bingo AND a bottle of wine when we won the Mon-Thurs night quiz league….

Anyway, this is supposed to be a fishing blog so let’s get on topic…

So we arrived on Monday 19th at around 1230, booked in, registered out EA cards at reception for the fishing and, as the caravan wouldn’t be ready until 1500, Liz and brother went to the bar for beers whilst I got out the spinning/lure rod and headed to the pool for a couple of hours. There were a couple of guys already fishing with their bivvies up so I suspect they’d be on the pool overnight as they packed down about half an hour later – but they were back there the following morning at 0700 when I arrived so must have overnighted again. Anyway, I spun and lured for a couple of hours with no joy before heading off to join Liz and Chris in the bar.

Tuesday, 20th, I arrived back at the pool with the pike rods at 0700. I tried ledgered pop-up bluey (Pacific Saury) and smelt deadbaits for 3-4 hours with no joy before swapping to float fished baits (Xmas Tree of red sprats on one rod and a skipjack on the other until 1530 when I packed in for the day. I did have a couple of bobs of a float and an 18” glide against the wind at 1430 on the Xmas Tree rod but that was the only action of the day….

Wednesday was a very wet and windy day and so no fishing took place…

Thursday, 22nd, I headed to the pool again at 0700, this time with the general coarse ledger rods and a selection of baits. I ledgered worm, maggot and sweetcorn until 1230 when I admitted defeat to a rising cold breeze and left the pool after only one small twitch to a worm bait.

And that was the last session on the pool as the weather wasn’t the best on the Friday and we wanted to pop out along the coast to enjoy our other hobby – discount store, market and charity shop perusing… and that was more successful as I acquired around 10 fishing books, a fishing related clock, 2 John Wilson DVD sets, a Matt Hayes DVD, and fishing socks…. plus a ‘Just William’ 15 story compendium.

Anyway, home now and prepping for my next water’s edge visit on Friday and planning to be a pike fishing session at Pike Pool 24.

Oh, and I did have one mishap at Lakeside… wore my padded bib&braces and knelt on the edge of one of the fishing platforms whilst baiting my hook… as I stood up a loose end of the chicken wire on the platform used to stop slipping caught in the fabric and …RRRIIIIPPPPPP!!!.. big hole in the leg! Anyway, they got binned and a new pair was purchased from Fishing Republic via Amazon and they’d arrived when we got home yesterday… great they are but possibly XXL may have been big enough rather than the XXXL I actually bought (and the usual size of clothing I buy – I’m 16 stone, 5’10” and 46”+ chest) – but plenty of room for jumpers, etc underneath although they are exceptionally well padded anyway… and they also have wide zipped bottoms, which my original set didn’t, so I should be able to put on/off without removing boots as I’ve needed to do before…